Fine bookmaker to the world;

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It is a rare company that can say of its
products that Presidents and Kings
have sworn by them for centuries—that
they consoled Abraham Lincoln,
crossed the American continent in
countless prairie schooners, sailed the
seven seas, and still stand today beside
almost every literate user of the English
language as his source of knowledge
and inspiration. There can't be many
organizations that can make such a
claim, but one is the Oxford University
Press.
The oldest publishing house in the
English-speaking world, Oxford Uni­versity
Press with its many overseas
branches is a global enterprise that has
played an important part, though a
quiet one, in the unfolding drama of
our civilization. For books accumulat­ing
man's knowledge and expressing his
aspirations have exerted a force as
mighty as armies in changing men's
beliefs and their way of life. In produc­ing
such books the Oxford University
Press has helped to establish our mod­ern
world.
Now approaching its 500th anniver­sary,
the Press in England and else­where
in the British Commonwealth
has been a client of Deloitte, Plender,
Griffiths & Co. since 1939. The Ameri­can
branch of the Press, operating as a
separate company with headquarters
in New York, has been a New York
client since 1940.
The Press is by no means an ordinary
book publisher. In many publishing
houses, merchandise ranging from the
finest to the most sleazy can all pass
under the name of "book," provided
only that it has printed pages and a
cover. Oxford, however, has won world­wide
fame as a publisher of the highest
quality books, noted for the lasting
value of their contents, beauty of de­sign
and excellence of manufacture.
The Press did not win its reputation
overnight; it took a few centuries to
reach the top. The first known printed
book from a press at Oxford, a com­mentary
in Latin on the Apostles' Creed
attributed to St. Jerome, appeared in
1478. This was about twenty-five years
after Johann Gutenberg's first work
printed from movable type appeared,
and just one year after William Caxton
produced the first book printed in Eng­land.
The Oxford book was the press-work
of Theodoric Rood, who had
journeyed to Oxford from Cologne,
Germany. The Press then languished
through a century of intermittent activ­ity,
this being a time when the crown
closely controlled the use of the print­ing
press because rulers considered it a
danger to the stability of the realm.
Finally the Earl of Leicester, a favor­ite
of Queen Elizabeth I and Chancel­lor
of Oxford University, obtained a
court decree in 1586 authorizing the
University to print. From that date to
this, the Oxford University Press has
been in continuous operation. And how
it has grown! Today the New York
branch of the Press offers 6,000 titles
in its annual catalog. In England it
offers 10,000 titles of Oxford books in
print, ready for shipment. In addition,
the Press in England distributes many
books originating in other publishing
houses abroad, so that its total offerings
in Britain run close to 18,000 titles.
Until 1880 the only office of the Press
was at Oxford, except for the Bible
warehouse in London. Then Henry
Frowde, warehouse manager, was ap­pointed
the first "Publisher to the Uni­versity,"
with the function to distribute
books issued by the Press in Oxford.
Before long the London department be­gan
to originate books outside the fields
of academic scholarship, to which the
Press had confined itself. Now the
London department is one of the largest
publishers in Britain. Its books bear the
imprint "London, Oxford University
Press," to distinguish them from those
produced in the city of Oxford, which
read: "At the Clarendon Press."
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